help wanted

Docear at JCDL 2013 in Indianapolis (USA), three demo papers, proof-reading wanted

Three of our submissions to the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) were accepted. They relate to recommender systems, reference management, and pdf metadata extraction:

Docear4Word: Reference Management for Microsoft Word based on BibTeX and the Citation Style Language (CSL)

In this demo-paper we introduce Docear4Word. Docear4Word enables researchers to insert and format their references and bibliographies in Microsoft Word, based on BibTeX and the Citation Style Language (CSL). Docear4Word features over 1,700 citation styles (Harvard, IEEE, ACM, etc.), is published as open source tool on http://docear.org, and runs with Microsoft Word 2002 and later on Windows XP and later. Docear4Word is similar to the MS-Word add-ons that reference managers like Endnote, Zotero, or Citavi offer with the difference that it is being developed to work with the de-facto standard BibTeX and hence to work with almost any reference manager.

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By Joeran Beel, ago

We need your help (i.e. a server) to build a repository for academic PDF files

It’s a while ago that we started crawling the Web for academic PDFs to index them and use them for Docear’s research paper recommender system. Meanwhile, we have collected quite a few PDFs.  Unfortunately, in a foreseeable future, our servers’ disks will be full and the load of our servers is too high already (that’s why you sometimes won’t get recommendations in Docear – our servers simply are too busy).

Since our budget is tight and we don’t want to spend too much time for server administration neither, we are asking for your help: Do you have a server that you could spare? What we need is the following

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By Joeran Beel, ago

Don’t be shy: Write a testimonial about Docear

Today I was giving a presentation about Docear. Among others I wanted to show how positive many researchers respond to the concept of Docear. So I assembled a little picture with quotes  about Docear (SciPlore MindMapping respectively) (see figure below).

After the presentation one of the attendees told me, he was surprised to not find any of the quotes on our testimonial page. Well, he was absolutely right. The most enthusiastic feedback we receive is by email. I have no clue why, but users seem to be a little bit shy when posting their opinion publicly.

For us, it’s really important to know what users think and their feedback – your feedback – may really help us, for instance, to convince our university to provide us with further resources (at least if your feedback is positive ;-). So, I would like to ask you: If you are a Docear user, write a short testimonial. Don’t send it by email, don’t post in here as a comment – leave it on our testimonial page, and please be a little bit enthusiastic  :-). Surely, we don’t want you to write something you do not really think. But please also don’t hold back. And of course, we are also happy to hear constructive criticism. If you have ideas on improving Docear, if there is something you don’t like, let us know in our forum and we will happily discuss the issue with you.

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By Joeran Beel, ago

Dreaming of an integrated Java PDF Viewer for Docear

Maybe the most disturbing thing about Docear is the lack of a proper PDF reader that creates comments, bookmarks and highlighted text that can be imported by Docear and that runs on all operating systems. Personally, I use Foxit Reader and create bookmarks to remember important statements but it can’t highlight text properly. PDF XChange Viewer could be a great alternative if they had persistent object numbers – but they don’t (read here for more details).

Due to the lack of a truly proper Java PDF viewer, we are considering to develop our own PDF viewer. There are plenty of Java PDF libraries out there. However, I had a look at them and none of  seem is really suitable. Aspose PDF, iText, jPod Renderer>, PDF Tron, Big Faceless Java PDF, CABAReT Stage, jPDFBookmarks, JPedal, PDFBox, ICE Pdf, ReMarksPDF, and Qoppa’s jPDFViewer all have some shortcomings. Either they have many features but are commercial (e.g. Big Faceless Java PDF), or they are open source but do not offer the required feature or have serious bugs (e.g. PDFBox).

So, my question: Do you know of any other Java PDF libraries or even better a fully functional Java PDF viewer? Our requirements are:

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By Joeran Beel, ago